Beginning a Trip Into The Rack Country

Under a blazing Georgia sun we begin our journey of 3,400 miles through the black South. Cotton is greening the blood-red soil of the endless fields. It’s cotton chopping time, when the cotton plants must be thinned out. Family by family the Negro share-croppers are in the fields, children of seven or eight and grandmothers and grandfathers who totter when they walk but still are able to swing a hoe. Not all of the women are in the fields, though. This is Monday, wash day in the South as in the North. All along the highway and the little side roads the iron kettles are steaming over fires in the yards — dirty clothes boiling clean. We stop off for a drink of water and a bite of corn pone in the kitchen of Hannah Ingram. Hannah is one of the hundreds of Negro homesteaders on the Flint River project In Macon county. It’s a tract of some 12,000 acres bought by the federal government eight years ago and divided into tracts running from 50 to 200 acres. These were parcelled out to Negro share-croppers who could make a small down payment. They’ve got 40 years to pay out.